“What shall the harvest be?” the composition of Mrs. Emily
Oakey, and as sung by Mr. Sankey, won to Christ and to the
gospel ministry the Rev. W. O. Lattimore, long pastor in
Evanston, Ill. Young Lattimore joined the army in 1861 a moral
youth of eighteen years, but later, a first lieutenant, he fell
into drink, becoming a physical wreck. But one day in 1876, in
the gallery of Moody’s Tabernacle in Chicago, dazed from drink,
the voice of Sankey in this pathetic song aroused in him new
emotions, particularly the words:
“Sowing the seed of a lingering pain,
Sowing the seed of a maddened brain,
Sowing the seed of a tarnished name,
Sowing the seed of eternal shame,
O, what shall the harvest be?”
The seed was sown--good seed this time; and from the saloon
to which he withdrew, he returned to the Tabernacle, found a
Savior, rejoined wife and child whom he had long abandoned, and
after a successful pastorate of twenty years, died in 1899--a
whole harvest to the seed-sowing of Christian song.
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